UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2005

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Feature

Two-Part Harmony
Ziying Tang & Dong Zhang marry form & function in their winning landscape design

—Carol Cambo




	Graduate landscape architect students Ziying Tang and Dong Zhang. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

OPPOSITES ATTRACT. YIN AND YANG. It takes two to tango.

Clichés, yes, but a kernel of truth links them: Complementary energies are a powerful force—just ask Ziying Tang and Dong Zhang, who together are making their mark on the world of landscape architecture.

Last fall, these Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning graduate students (they collect their degrees this month) took first prize in a pair of prestigious design competitions. Their lauded designs are literally worlds apart: one a series of water gardens for the Olympic Forest Park of the 2008 summer games to be hosted by Beijing; the other, a reconsideration of the east side of the UMass Amherst campus around the Fine Arts Center. Their blended approach, however, is closer to home. Zhang and Tang are not only professional partners; the Beijing natives are also husband and wife.

And just as any marriage needs a healthy dose of compromise, so too does every project. Zhang prefers the challenge of engineering large-scale landscapes, like the 120-unit apartment development on 29 acres he’s helping design in Greenfield. Tang prefers “smaller projects, parks and gardens,” likening each one to a public work of environmental art. The combination of their different approaches is getting noticed in their field.

Zhang and Tang took top honors and a $3,500 purse in the 2004 International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Student Design Competition with their project: “The Harmony of Ecological Function and Cultural Perceptions.” Their design integrated modern ecological water management technique with Chinese traditional gardening in the prospective Olympic park. In the last 50 years, annual rainfall in Beijing has decreased by 50 percent, emphasizing the need to cleanse and infiltrate groundwater as a matter of urban planning. But, says Tang, their design did so “without ignoring local culture and aesthetics.” The site was in the city’s ancient axis and a few miles from Beijing’s Forbidden City, so they integrated traditional Chinese garden design elements while addressing contemporary ecological challenges.

For the National Low Impact Development Design Competition sponsored by the University of Maryland, Zhang and Tang redesigned the Fine Arts Center plaza “in an effort to address the amount of concrete,” says Zhang, “and also the water being released directly from it into the campus pond.” With help from professor Jack Ahern, they designed natural infiltration systems in the form of rain gardens planted with different materials to upgrade the pond’s water quality. The judges said their design was “a perfect integration of site history, technical drawings, and realistic solutions.” They took home $4,500 for their winning plan.

Water recurs as a theme in these landscapes, and it’s an element of particular interest to Zhang and Tang as they prepare to head back to Beijing next year. “Before, in our country, we’d just look for ways to move water in order to build,” explains Zhang. “Now we realize we must pay greater attention to conservation in the face of China’s rapid urbanization.”

But both agree it won’t be easy, since environmental regulations are few and far between in China. “The challenge will be to convince builders to use such plans because they will be more costly,” says Tang, “but it’s a critical issue.” If anyone is up to the task, it’s Tang and Zhang, with a proven talent for finding common ground.

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There Goes the Neighborhood

There Goes the Neighborhood: more images

Two-Part Harmony

Two-Part Harmony: larger image